Drytek - DRIE 100 Plasma Etcher

Summary : Dry etching had not yet come into its own back in 1981. Barrel Etchers had been in use for almost five years but were successful mostly when used as ashers to remove photoresist.

Dry etching had not yet come into its own back in 1981. Barrel Etchers had been in use for almost five years but were successful mostly when used as ashers to remove photoresist. Planar etching began to make some headway soon after with Alan Reinberg’s invention of the parallel plate reactor. Soon Reactive Ion Etch (RIE) entered the scene. It offered substantially better etch uniformity when processing wafers one at a time, but was very slow. The DRIE-100 was one of the first machines to offer multiple wafer planar reactive ion etch. Despite that, other single wafer etching suppliers had gained the upper hand and Drytek was eventually absorbed into Lam Research. Many of the advances made in this machine survive in modern descendants.